Salesforce.com Do.com Taps Gmail to Tackle Microsoft

Salesforce.com's takes the Manymoon assets and rewrites them as a Heroku-based project management app using Gmail and Google Docs, challenging Microsoft with Do.com.

Salesforce.com (NASDAQ:CRM) is making Google's
(NASDAQ:GOOG) Gmail and Google Docs applications the centerpiece for a new task
management and collaboration application, called Do.com.

Now in limited beta testing, Do.com offers group planning helping organize workflows with their contacts
around tasks in what Salesforce.com Senior Vice President Sean Whiteley told
ReadWriteWeb is a "prosumer application" used for anything from
grocery lists and social event planning to small project management. See screenshots here.

To lower the barrier to entry, Do.com users may invite
colleagues, friends and family to tasks regardless of whether those contacts
are Do.com users. Though Do.com is accessible as a Web app through all browsers,
it's also available as an iOS mobile app for iPhone and iPad with a Google
Android app coming later.
Written in HTML5 via Salesforce.com's Heroku platform,
Do.com is a fresh take on Manymoon, the project management application Salesforce.com acquired last
February to fortify its enterprise cloud collaboration platform.
Manymoon, a popular app from Google's App Marketplace, integrated
with Google Apps to let knowledge workers do such things as attach Google Docs
to tasks, projects and events; add project information to shared Google
Calendars; and implement a gadget for collaborative task management in Google
Sites.

Some of those same utilities have been ported over to
Do.com, Whiteley told ReadWriteWeb. The product, which next year will be
available as a paid app with premium features, certainly appears aimed at
attacking Microsoft Project 2010 or even SharePoint to a degree.
Beagle Research analyst Denis Pombriant said Do.com is an
interesting tool for keeping all the balls in the air in a typical busy work
and personal life.
"It makes sense especially for a busy person who
works in and outside of a formal office -- i.e. on the road, etc. It is not finished but the company appears to
be poised to continue providing resources to make it a hit," Pombriant said. "It could be core to the business if the
social phenomenon continues to roll along."
While Do.com appears to compete with project management
apps such as Base Camp or Microsoft Project, Pombriant said Salesforce is
apparently intent on inventing new categories and new businesses, not unlike
what Microsoft did successfully in the 1980s and '90s.
Time will tell if Do.com will catch on, as Pombriant
noted that with Microsoft, no single product was complete or had all of the
resources it needed to be a hit.
"The strategy was to see if there was market uptake
and if there was interest, resources would be allocated to complete the product
and take over the niche," Pombriant said. "This worked for Windows
(recall it was Windows 3.0 that was the hit) and for Office. Other
products languished."
Still, Do.com is another way for Salesforce.com to
leverage its own assets, as well as that of cloud partner Google, to attack the
Redmond, Wash.-based software giant.